T.F. Mancuso, Who Led Radiation Study, Dies at 92

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: July 7, 2004

Correction Appended

Thomas F. Mancuso, a pioneering epidemiologist at the center of a bitter dispute with the federal government over the possible long-term effects of small doses of radiation on nuclear bomb workers, died Sunday at an assisted-living center in Oakland, Calif. He was 92 and had esophageal cancer, his family said.

Until World War II, occupational epidemiology, or the study of health effects caused by work, centered on accidents or acute illness. Dr. Mancuso was instrumental in shifting the focus to long-term consequences, which required following up and finding the cause of death for people who had left the work force months or years earlier.

''He realized you had to follow people through death, and figure out what they died from,'' said Dr. David Michaels, a former assistant secretary of energy who is now a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. ''He would put together these long-term studies, put together old records and follow people into the present. That was a huge breakthrough.''

In 1977, Dr. Mancuso became a hero to the antinuclear movement when the Atomic Energy Commission terminated a contract he had held since 1965 to study the effects, if any, of small radiation doses on 500,000 bomb workers.

His conflict with the agency, the successor to the wartime Manhattan Project, had begun in 1974 when a Washington State epidemiologist presented data indicating that former workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation were dying of cancer at abnormally high rates. Dr. Mancuso was asked to endorse a press release that contradicted the finding, but he refused, saying that his research was not finished. He later presented a study, with Dr. Alice Stewart and George W. Kneale, concluding that low doses of radiation had caused an increase in the number of cancers.

His dismissal eventually led to Congressional hearings.

''This disillusioned him to a certain degree,'' said his son, Thomas P. Mancuso. ''He was very clear about being scientific.''

In 1992, 15 years after the Atomic Energy Commission acted against him, and after a lengthy struggle for access to the data, he wrote another study, again with Dr. Stewart and Mr. Kneale, on cancer among workers at Hanford. The study, of 35,000 workers and financed with money paid by the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors to settle a case after the accident there in 1979, concluded that small doses of radiation were far more dangerous than official estimates.

The study has not been accepted by health regulators. But the government's nuclear weapons manufacturing complex, now under the control of the Department of Energy, acknowledged in 2000 that exposure to radiation and hazardous materials had, in fact, made some people sick.

In a career of more than 50 years in industrial hygiene and then epidemiology, Dr. Mancuso investigated the health hazards of a variety of chemical compounds and metals in industrial use, including asbestos, chromium and beryllium.

Born in Brooklyn on Feb. 19, 1912, he was prompted to go into medicine while he was a boy when his older brother died of heart failure on a high school football field, his son said yesterday.

In addition to his son, Dr. Mancuso is survived by his wife of 61 years, Raffaella Spinelli Mancuso, also of Oakland; two daughters, Jo-Ellen Mancuso of Watertown, Mass., and Margaret Mancuso of Berkeley, Calif.; and a grandson.

Photo: Thomas F. Mancuso (Photo by Thomas P. Mancuso)

Correction: July 9, 2004, Friday An obituary on Tuesday about Thomas F. Mancuso, an epidemiologist who specialized in effects of radiation, misstated the name of the agency that, in 1977, revoked his contract to study the health of nuclear bomb workers. It was the federal Department of Energy; the Atomic Energy Commission, which issued the contract in 1965, was later absorbed by the department.